Helen O'Shea

Helen O’Shea is the Australian author of non-fiction works about Irish traditional music, including her acclaimed book The Making of Irish Traditional Music (2008). She has also published creative non-fiction based on oral history projects in rural Australia. For most of her life, Helen has performed Irish traditional music on the fiddle, mentored by musicians from East Galway and East Clare, including Paddy Canny’s brother Jack, who migrated to Australia in the 1960s. From first hearing a recording of Paddy Canny playing with P. J. Hayes, she fell in love with his music, as so many listeners have. Her musical understanding developed during her years as a graduate student in Ireland c1980, while researching Seamus Heaney’s poetry, in extended visits to Ireland and during a year of doctoral fieldwork in East Clare in 2000. Her experience teaching and researching at universities in Ireland and Australia encompasses literature, history and music. She is currently an honorary research fellow in ethnomusicology at the University of Melbourne.

No Better Boy: Listening to Paddy Canny was published by Lilliput Press in May 2023.

In No Better Boy, I tell the story of a master of traditional Irish music: the legendary East Clare fiddler Paddy Canny, whose haunting music was remarkable for its virtuosity and sophistication. In the 1950s, when he was in his thirties and at the pinnacle of his career, Paddy Canny became a national radio star, played solo in Carnegie Hall, toured England with the renowned Tulla Céilí Band, and made a much-loved recording. All were extraordinary achievements for a man raised on a marginal farm, where the gramophone records that inspired him were accessible only through the good grace of neighbours.

In the book, I distil stories of success and adversity that Paddy Canny told to family and friends, to radio interviewers and historians. These stories illuminate rural life in mid-twentieth-century Ireland, major social and economic changes,and the decline and revival of traditional music and dancing. No Better Boy emphasises ways of understanding and listening, and explores the techniques and approach that make this legendary East Clare fiddler’s delicate, deeply emotional music uniquely attractive. I also emphasize the significance of listening—how it changed radically with technological innovations throughout the twentieth century and what effect this had on musicians and their music-making. Beautifully designed and illustrated, the book includes 25 annotated musical transcriptions played by Paddy Canny and his contemporaries, sourced from archives and personal collections as well as commercial recordings, are included.

No Better Boy has been enthusiastically received:

A ‘must-read’ for anyone who loves traditional music. The book is beautifully illustrated and the musical transcriptions will be welcomed by practitioners who appreciate the nuances in the art form. No Better Boy is a remarkable achievement.

Liam O'Connor, Director, Irish Traditional Music Archive

Helen O’Shea captures intimately the musical, physical and personal landscapes of East Clare as if they were her own. I found myself, my locale, and the people and the music I know and love, illuminated in new and wonderful ways.

Paula Carroll, Clare FM broadcaster and Oral Historian

A richly enlightening journey through the life and times of one of Ireland’s most important fiddle players.

Martin Dowling, The Journal of Music

Detailed tune transcriptions and much music analysis makes tremendous sense of Paddy Canny as a stylist, his technique, and composition and arrangement ingenuity. This makes the work much more than a personal tale set in an evocative historical landscape. An expert and tender chronicle.

Fintan Vallely, musician, author and editor of The Companion to Irish Traditional Music

‘[This] beautifully illustrated tome goes to the heart of the man and his music.’ Fiona McGarry, Clare Champion

‘No Better Boy provides a profound and compelling picture of Canny’s life and music, accessible to non-musicians and musicians alike. O’Shea’s prose style bears a certain kinship to Canny’s music, at once lyrical and economical … this is a meticulously researched piece of writing … her diligence as an oral historian must be applauded [and her] command of narrative and imagery leaves such a profound emotional impact. One of the most interesting aspects of the book is its depiction of the series of technological and cultural revolutions that reshaped Irish traditional music in the 20th century.’ Matthew Horsley, Tinteán

‘Helen O’Shea has written a splendid and multi-layered book, blending text, image and music. The Lilliput Press have produced a very handsome book; it is most attractive to the eye and to the holding hand. Paddy Canny is most fortunate in having Helen O’Shea as his recording angel.’ Peter Beirne

My first book, The Making of Irish Traditional Music (Cork University Press, 2008), emerged out of a doctoral dissertation and so is theoretically informed and draws on my teaching and research in the social sciences. In the book, I analyse Irish traditional music’s codification in the context of Ireland’s emerging nationalist movement and challenge assumptions that it derives from and expresses an ethnically pure, nationally unified culture. Focusing on instrumental music, I contrast the new Irish state’s appropriation of the music with musicians’ self-expression through their varied performances of the tune “The Morning Dew”. I also consider the consequences of the romanticized view of the West of Ireland and its music culture promoted by the tourism industry. Drawing on my own experiences as a fiddle player, I explore the protocol of the session and in other chapters critique the music’s masculinist culture and explore the geographical, ideological and aesthetic underpinnings of regional style.

The Making of Irish Traditional Music has been highly acclaimed:

Provides a valuable, theoretically informed cultural history of the retrieval and codification of Irish music in the context of an emergent Irish nationalism. It offers a valuable critique of notions of identity and authenticity at the very inner sanctum of an essential mode of Irish self-expression, but does so with considerable sensitivity to the pressures that draw people to adhere to notions of ethnic or national identity. The historical dimension of this work, from Bunting in the late eighteenth century and O'Neill in the late nineteenth to the emergence of independent state cultural institutions and their effect on the formation of ‘traditional’ and official versions of Irish music, is one of the very best continuous accounts available.

David Lloyd, Professor of English, University of Southern California

Makes a significant contribution to Irish music studies, especially with respect to the place of outsiders within the tradition.

Susan Motherway, Ethnomusicology

An exemplary ethnomusicological study ... one of the best books currently available on traditional Irish music

Ann Spinney, Irish Literary Supplement, Boston College